


Imaginary Colours

by Lenora_Rose



Category: Puff the Magic Dragon (Song)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 13:14:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lenora_Rose/pseuds/Lenora_Rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't need to explain to an imaginary friend that he's imaginary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imaginary Colours

I was born in a small coastal town during our Great War. My father came home within the first five months of battle from a crippling injury -- to perish instead of the flu epidemic three years on. Therefore not only was I an only child in my household, I was the only child of my age. The few other children all came after the war -- when the six other soldiers who survived at all returned -- anywhere from four years to ten younger than me, and they were never my peers; at best I was "eldest brother" to the lot. I always liked kids, everywhere I went, but always with paternal fondness.

When I felt the need to escape -- I liked the youngsters but not all the time -- I would go by myself along the coast, to the hidden path I'd found to the secret cove. It might not have been much of a secret to older generations in their own childhoods; in my explorations I'd found remnants of toy boats, a broken baseball, someone's buried tin box of treasure. Certainly my mother seemed to have enough idea where I was not to fret. But because it was my secret place, I didn't tell any of the youngsters.

Because I was alone so much, I had a number of imaginary friends. Some I shared with the youngsters, passed on to them like treats. One, though, was too precious to give up.

The doctors expressed deep concern that growing up so alone had done me irreparable damage. My mother, however, had deep faith in me, and championed me. I determined not to disappoint her.

When I was eighteen, I left to find other work. I had one thing few others of my generation had; some experience handling a full-sized boat. So I took to sea. First along our coast. Then to other nearby lands. Then across the vastest wildest sea, to places which had never suffered as had our continent. 

I met a girl overseas, as one does. Ruthie was also a traveller, looking for work and adventure and new sights. Her reasons were the opposite of mine. In her homeland, she said, there were too many children, too many people, for there to be jobs for all.

I'd heard of her land, seen other workers from there, heard the story before. Most of her people were gregarious, cheerful, and weirdly confident. She was - well, she was still confident. I liked that in her. But at her core, she was more inclined to low talk with a friend than to rush off into boisterous crowds, and she seemed to enjoy my silence. When I reached out and held her hand, and she squeezed it back - well, that was what turned a coffee between friends into a first date.

"Come home with me," she said one day. "I think you'd like seeing a country full of children. And I want you to meet my parents."

I hadn't proposed, wasn't sure I was ready to admit aloud I wanted to be with her for life. Not for doubt in her. My silence was a scar from so many losses, from my father to leaving behind what I'd loved best, even motivated by my determination to prove my mother's trust in me true. 

But I didn't admit it. Instead I blushed and went with her. It was a good first step, I thought. Find out the worst before I take the plunge.

On the ship across the water, I remarked once that she always seemed to have her eyes on the sky. 

"Oh," she said, laughing, but also blushing as if she'd been caught at something shameful. "I'm looking for dragons. I know better, but I still wish I could see one."

I put an arm around her, and, because I loved her and she looked so strangely ashamed of her whimsy, I dared to tell her what I'd only told once before. "When I was a boy, my favourite of my imaginary friends was a dragon."

"Really?" she said.

"He lived in a private cove. A bright green dragon, with a big balloon belly and tiny wings."

She leaned her head on my shoulder, and used the way it hid her gestures to poke me in the ticklish spot in my side. "Silly. Dragons aren't green." As I twisted to catch and tickle her waist in return, she slipped back, lips crinkled, eyes big with startlement. "Wait, Jack. You're colourblind."

"Exactly," I told her, pleased she'd caught on. My mother had, too. "But everyone talks about how bright and beautiful it is when everything turns green in spring. So my best imaginary friend had to be the best imaginary colour."

She smiled at me, head back, hand light on the rail, and my whole being hummed joyfully with her.

The first sight I had of her country was of Reborn Point, where a lonely lighthouse stood guard. The slope back to the mainland glittered at a distance. Up close, I could see that it was topped with fantastical crests and long narrow curves pointing skyward, all flashing as if crusted with crystal. The sailors took off their hats to that sight, pausing for a full minute in their work before pressing onward. Ruthie joined their silence. I respected it, and, sensing Ruthie was braced for discomfort, and noting how the sailors, after their moment of respect, didn't look up again, chose not to ask about the shining spires.

The town nested in the harbour beyond gleamed, neat-swept, street and building alike in the soft even hue of the local stone, neat garden patches along the ground, balconies busy with flowers.

We arrived when Spring was preparing to turn into full summer, with lilacs everywhere, some near white, some dark and lush, and all the range between. We'd come upon the scent suddenly, on a breeze blowing along a seemingly open beach, around a corner, in a sudden gust through a restaurant door. I had been fond of the scent -- there were lilacs in the part of the cove protected from the sea breeze -- but this ubiquity left me more twitchy and gloomy than I expected.

Her parents were kind and welcoming, curious about my homeland, my prospects, and my treatment of their daughter. The answers to all these things satisfied them -- or outright pleased them. It didn't bother them, either, that I hadn't proposed. After two weeks, we went to picnic alone on the shore, and a sudden breeze filled the air with lilac once more. I shuddered. But she glanced back towards land and said, "That's a lucky omen."

And she proposed to me.

This was not, apparently, either unusual or inappropriate in her country. In spite of my initial shock, when I searched my heart, I not only did not mind that she had pre-empted my duty as a man, but I was ready to say yes, though I hadn't been ready -- or maybe just hadn't been strong enough -- to speak.

Besides, I was twenty-two years old, and I'd always considered that a lucky number.

"Of course you'll stay for the festival," her mother said when we came back, and Ruthie told her parents, teetering between giddy giggle and sober joy. "We can start making arrangements. Though I imagine you'll be wanting to take Ruthie to meet your mother before the event?"

I said, "That is, if you don't mind-"

"Of course," she repeated.

"You'll like the festival," Ruthie said. "It's all about two of your favourite things. Children and dragons."

I laughed.

When we arrived at the fairgrounds, of course there were the crowds of children and parents, in the whole gamut of moods, and there were fair games like and unlike ours - I saw no prizes, no cheap gewgaws. The few wares for sale; mostly foodstuffs. There were also banners and folded paper hangings everywhere, all blazoned with dragons, realistic and stylized both. Some of the dragons were long and sleek, their wings vast with scales like feathers, some round in the belly and decorated with far less practical wings, but both kinds had long whippy tails, and ridges over their backs in the shape of lilac leaves, and they all had limpid eyes and unlikely slender noses, like greyhounds. The banner backgrounds were some blue and yellow, which I could tell, and some shades that blurred together in my eyes. The dragons were one and all of some colour I couldn't distinguish, the same range of grey. "Red?" I said at last. Ruthie had said they weren't green.

"Well, naturally," she said, and led me past the games, up to an arena.

There it seemed every parent led their child, especially the youngest, the toddlers restless in spite of several play areas with slides and swings, wheeled riding horses and rockers. The centre of the arena was marked off by a double circle of flat stones, forming a ring path. I saw children dash through the centre heedlessly, and parents follow along the ring path; nobody called the children back from the centre but no adult entered. More oddly, there seemed to be similar ringed areas scattered through the arena stands, about six rows long and equally wide. Ruthie parked us just behind one, which meant we had a clearer view down than had we sat directly behind other people. It seemed not to be an especially coveted spot, regardless.

The children let out cries of delight, and those in the centre of the arena scampered back to parents, pointing skyward. A fanfare blared out from the bands, sharp brass that cut through the noise.

I could see rings of ribbons descending; empty rings circling down from the sky, rigid and unmoved by the breeze, though the wind had picked up, carrying again the ubiquitous scent of lilac. I looked for some aeroplane, some winged device above that had released them - then noted the tall peaked towers around the edge of the arena. As they descended, I spotted the occasional glint and glimmer between them, like hints of suspending wires. They settled a few feet over the heads of the nearest children, most of them in the arena centre, but a few over the other empty spaces. In time with a gust that nearly lost me my cap, one paused, dangling, a few feet in front of me. "Oh, good luck!" Ruthie said. "A female - it's a purple garland. It's green for the males."

"If you say so," I replied, cheerfully.

"Why do you think I'm telling you?" She stretched out her hands, counting. "Twenty, twenty-one - there should be twenty-two. It's their lucky number. Do you see the last one?"

"Whose lucky number?"

"Well, the dragons'."

"I don't see -"

Before I finished the sentence, an uneasy chill settled over me, for I heard scraping like something long and heavy dragging along the stand in front of me, followed by a clicking scratchy noise, like a talon seeking purchase. The ribbon garland -- actually a band of fabric as wide as my forearm, wrapped around empty air in a circle I could just wrap my arms around -- had shifted in the air, a small restless twist. 

The scent of lilac was overpowering.

There had been shockingly little sound to the rising wind, I thought. It was almost a familiar thought.

Ruthie, oblivious to the quake in my soul, said, "Of course you can't see them. No adult can. Oh, look, they're bringing the children forward."

"They can see?" I said - or tried. I seemed to have no air in my lungs, and a creeping terrible feeling pressing hard against my ribs. The words came out tiny, airless.

"Just look at them."

I did, lip caught hard between my teeth. Pre-schoolers, none older than five, were being brought forward between their parents, hands raised as often as not, every face aglow. Infants in their mothers arms squealing delight they could express no other way, flailing arms that could not yet reach straight. Toddlers clapping their hands in joy then wriggling forward, caught up by mothers who laughed and lifted them high.

"They're not afraid," I said at last. If the ribbon garlands were wrapped around the collar, if the hands reached for heads that bent on the end of a swan-neck, the dragons they claimed to see had to be seven or eight times longer than a man was tall. Just right.

"Have you _ever_ heard of a child being afraid of a dragon?" Ruthie said, as if I'd shocked her.

"No," I said. I hadn't been.

I couldn't see how the parents were divided among the dragons in presenting their children, but there seemed to be some order in it. I watched as a cluster of the older children seemed to scramble, suspended, on a great bellying arc of body. A cradle for a baby was lifted into the air on some unseen power, the mother letting go without the least fear, just a tremor of delight.

I settled to watching, daring not to say another word. The lilac scent was underscored by musk and a hint of burnt leaves. I think the full half of an hour passed as these young ones played, and were at last collected and retrieved home. All but three, toddlers all. This trio had been presented by people who'd had a more official look to them, more clipboards than parents, though they hadn't seemed cold about their duty. They collected close around two of the ribboned garlands - two dragons, if indeed there were dragons invisible in that place. One dangled by his arms above the ribbon, wrapped tight and clinging to empty air. One straddled nothingness, bouncing in her place. One, sleepy, snuggled hovering just above the ground, in some gentle cradle.

"Orphans," I said at last.

A slithering sound directly before us, as of a tail pulling straight. A gust of wind enough to steal breath, silent as owl flight - and the vast creak as one wooden row bent and shuddered, as if a weight had sprung off it. A weight smaller than one would assume from the seeming size of the things. And the ribbon garland swept up and down in a lazy arc, into the middle of the arena.

Ruthie let out a huff and drew back in a long slow sigh. "If the ribbon hadn't said so, now I'd know that was a female. Pity she left."

I glanced at the hanging banners. Lean shapes with long feather-scaled wings. Round bodied shapes with stubby ones that would be absurd for flight. Females that flew, I presumed. Males - males that floated, on a great internal bladder of superheated air, like a balloon, the wings and tail not for flight but steering.

The latter was more dignified and agile than it first sounded. He'd been astonishing - and from the point of view of foes, terrifying - tacking into the wind, silent, not fast but implacable. And the gust as he blew out the heated air - no visible flame until it ignited the pirate sails - had been a roar like doom. But astride his back I'd felt perfectly safe, unafraid. They had lowered their flag without a chance to use their gun.

They had known there was a dragon, hailed their foe. l had never considered they lowered their flag because their foe was invisible, and thus unstrikable.

In the arena, more children had now entered the arena; schoolchildren in hand-in-hand rows the way teachers commanded them to travel on field trips, near-adolescents firmly solitary and orderly, but all of them more intent than the toddlers, more inclined to arrow straight for a particular garland. A few made kindly older-sibling approaches to the three orphaned toddlers, but for the most part, they simply left those two garlands alone.

"Why would dragons take so much interest in human children?" I asked aloud, drinking in the burning smell and the lilacs. Scent was a key to memory, they said.

Ruthie opened her mouth, but before us came a voice, _basso profundo_ , deep beyond human. I'd been hearing low rumbles from below, and taking them for a part of the music, not voices blurred to indistinction. 

"Why should we not?"

I knew this thunder roll as well as I knew the smell, and but for Ruthie at my side, I might have been ten years old again. It took me long trembling moments to know it expected me to answer. "You live forever. We can't be that interesting."

"Not forever," said the voice, amused, as if thunder could laugh. Hot breath washed over us, more chemical-sharp than the waft from its body. There was no garland to warn us. So there were twenty-two dragons here after all. "Nature has no place for creatures that cannot change or renew themselves. But we do live long, yes. Very long to your eyes."

"Eight hundred and eighty seven years," I murmured. I'd forgotten the number. Had anyone asked me before this -- in what circumstances I can hardly imagine, but nonetheless -- I would have cited only my own child's answer, "But that's _practically_ forever." Even the adverb had faded over the years.

"And four months," said the voice - the dragon. He still used that lilt that could mean humour or merely tolerance. "You know us better than it seemed."

"I think I met one of you," I said, aware it was an admission of a failure so profound it would haunt my nights. Ruthie had backed slightly from me, forehead creased in troubled thought. But the way she cupped her hands together reassured me she wasn't reconsidering me -- when genuinely upset, she'd be more like to wrap her arms around her chest. "Long ago. But -- I didn't know his interest in me was --" In the arena, the children were losing that initial shade of best behaviour, and running free. "--Usual. "

"We bear few children of our own, over our long years -- and when we do, it is as tragic an occasion as it is joyous. Is it any wonder we are fascinated by how young and joyful things grow?"

"Not all childhoods are joyful," I said. "But clearly you know that." I nodded at the orphans.

"We do our best to make them so," it said. 

"Oh, no," said Ruthie, and touched the fingertips of both hands to her mouth. Her shoulders shivered. "We're not even married. It's too soon."

"But you were well-named, Ruth," said the dragon. "I said so, long ago."

She sucked in a breath, and I put an arm over her shoulders, privately relieved when she leaned into me, pressed her eyes against the bony point. 

"It is your man I am concerned with," the dragon continued.

"Jack," she said, muffled against me.

"Jack," amended the dragon. "You met one of us? How did it call itself?"

"Pfah," I said, a syllable I'd always found awkward, but which came easily from a long muzzle on a roll of heat. "Pfah Matteh."

"'The Dignified One,'" said this dragon, and I blushed a little, glad I hadn't mentioned what I'd always called him instead. Not that he had ever minded. Not that he had been less than playful, except against the pirates. "No doubt his kin will be interested to know where he went. Would you be willing to tell them of him?"

"I don't know," I said. "I. I think I wronged him."

"How so?"

"I never went back. After I turned twelve, I never returned."

"A pity but not a surprise," said this dragon. It hurt to look at empty air, so I kept watching the arena, leaning my cheek against the top of Ruthie's head. "Such a farewell is not uncommon, though it is painful."

I said nothing, but slid my cheek against her hair, feeling the silk.

It changed the subject, inquiring to me about my work, whether I had the money to set up a family. Whether I would consider leaving the sea and finding another business. I surprised myself then, saying, "I had a thought, once, but." I grimaced. "In my home country, it's usually women's work."

Maybe it was the scent lulling me. Maybe it was the feeling I spoke to my own past, to the friend who had heard my every dream. The friend of imaginary green, the friend who went imaginary to my mind before he was invisible to my eyes.

"Go on," the voice encouraged, the deep rumble that might have been history.

"My grandparents are getting old. My mother will. And there aren't enough children after. They'll need to be cared for. Doctors we have. Everyone who wants to do medicine wants to be a doctor. Not many want to be nurses."

"Nursing?" Ruthie said it first, glancing up. "That's - actually, it's kind of sweet. And grown up." A sidelong glance where the dragon should be. "Good grown up," she amended.

"It pays poorly," I replied. "Almost as bad as sailing."

"But you'd be home," Ruthie said. "Not far away at sea." She craned up at the dragon. "It might mean living there, not here."

"Acceptable," said the dragon. "Are you sure you are not ready, Ruth?"

She drew straight, hands in her lap. The arch of her neck seemed too tight for the pose, as if any moment now she would fling herself at the invisible thing, like some of the children had, and wrap her arms tight around it. "Maybe," she said.

"I will return shortly."

The silence stretched, and I can't say when I was certain the dragon had gone. Another male, then, floating silent away.

I wondered how often the scent I'd noticed in the town had come from the lilacs, and how often from a great creature nearby. I wondered, a little, that they grew so many lilacs, instead of ridding themselves of every one.

On the beach, proposing to me, Ruthie had thought it lucky.

"What's happening?" I asked. 

"They were thinking you might be a good father for one of the orphans."

I blinked, held my eyes closed for a time. "They've hardly seen me. They can't be sure. Nobody could in so little time."

"It's what dragons do," she said. "It's their job." 

"If they really love children so much, they have to be sure. It's so easy for someone to seem like they'd care, and turn out irresponsible. Or worse." Ruthie just twitched her lip, and hooded her eyes. "Why do they care so much? He didn't really answer."

Ruthie explained, her voice trembling slightly as if nervous. 

I knew dragons were fragile, light for their size, more hollow-boned than birds, the air bladder inside part of what allowed them to stand -- and to to do wonders, to scale cliffs on narrow limbs, to float and fly. The drawbacks hadn't occurred to me.

Dragons, Ruthie explained, had two ways to reproduce. If they bred as we did, the mother dragon would give birth to two young -- but would be shattered by the effort. It was not, as with us, a possible and frightening outcome; a female would breed knowing she was giving her life for her kind. Males raised the young - they were even the ones to lactate. 

The other means, rebirth, was worse. Ruthie pointed towards the lighthouse, the glittering curves into the sky. The great crystal-shining arcs of bones, ribs, tails, necks, slender limbs. "Those are the dragons who chose rebirth," she said. "They - they burn. What's left, besides the bones, is an egg. What used to be the dragon's body feeds the tiny one inside, the heat keeps it until it's ready to hatch."

"Why?" I burst out.

Ruthie shrugged. "To make great changes, they say. But they do it, like a mother, knowing - the new dragon isn't as helpless as a newborn. It can live on its own. But it's a new creature, a new soul, dragons say. It doesn't remember who it was. When they don't call them reborn, they call them 'fatherless'."

I wondered. If I learned I could have no children of my own, would I be so generous, so able to embrace this strange role the dragons had given themselves? "They don't just see the children at the festival."

"Oh, no. For the very young ones, this is their first time up close with one. But half our teachers are dragons. And some of those who care for the children while parents are at work. Of course, it's not all they do, or all of them, there are dragons who don't come to children, but -" Her voice petered out, and she flushed. "I'm sorry I'm babbling. I'm just nervous."

"About adopting," I said.

She nodded. "I always thought I would. But I thought, maybe after I had one or two of our own. When I knew what to do."

I held her hands. While the dragon had been here, I had been watching the three children who'd been left with the dragons, the whole while. It would be a lie to say I wasn't ready, just like it would have been a lie to say I wasn't ready to dedicate my life to this woman. But I said, "They may not be so pleased with me."

"Because you said goodbye to your dragon? But that happens, Jack. Some people find it very hard, when they lose sight of the dragons, to go back, to stay close. If that's the only thing against someone they're considering, they'll forgive it."

"There was no goodbye," I whispered. "You don't need to explain to an imaginary friend that he's imaginary."

"Oh, Jack," Ruthie said, aghast.

"I have to tell them," I said. "Before they think too much of me."

We fell into our customary silence. The dragon returned - garlanded now, but with a fresh ribbon darker than the ones I had seen in the arena, solid black as best I could tell. I told it the same.

A deep rumble started in the dragon's chest. I tensed as I would at a growling dog; that sound was the prelude to the blast of air hot enough to would ignite anything flammable it struck.

But instead, the noise died away. "Ruth, bring him to Reborn Point. I will find the father and sister of Pfah Matteh, or her children if the sister has passed."

So I came to be standing among the slim crystalline spires of dragon bones, hearing soft huge breathing, more like the rustle of wind in trees than breath, Ruthie beside me, as I told my story.

It was because of the pirates. I was twelve. I'd been spending more time in the cove with Pfah Matteh -- I kept saying that proper name, not the name I had made for him in private. He seemed lonely without me, and yet when I'd asked if he could come with me up to the town, he shook his head. "I don't need more people. Just you," he said. So we sailed together, my hands growing deft on the lines, while he pulled those too strong for me. Sometimes, if I asked my mother ahead, I would take a tent and sleeping bag and sleep with him under the stars.

Then I came to the cove to find him readying the boat without me. He had been summoned, he said, by the King in our country (And he did have one of the King's messenger pigeons with him). I asked, "But I thought the prime minister was the one who really ruled. Mother says so."

Pfah rumbled, cheerfully, "For most things, yes. But the King still speaks to dragons."

As I climbed the gangplank to join him, he said, "Not this time. You'll be away too long."

"I can't not meet the King!"

Pfah Matteh tried to persist, but I looked so disappointed, that at last he sighed, and said, "You may come, then. You're old enough to see more of the world."

I left a note for my mother, and we sailed away up the coast. 

The King had told him there were pirates raiding the shipping lines off our coast.

I was disappointed in the pirates, who had not a velvet coat or pirate flag or even a tallship to their name. They ran a steam boat with a machine gun, not cannon, and wore raggedy work clothes. Then Pfah roared his breath over their deck, and what could burn burned, and some metal melted, or warped - the machine-gun ruined.

He left me with the King on our boat while he negotiated their surrender, more afraid for my safety than he had been in the attack. 

I returned, full of the King's scones and the story.

I'd been four days away from home. My mother was frantic. I knew I couldn't lie to her, not this time. When I told her where I'd been, and what I'd been doing --

\-- That was when she told the doctors. Because until then, my "flights of fancy" hadn't taken me away for more than a few hours.

They put me in a hospital, an institution for the mad. As such places go, I feel I was lucky. My mother visited daily, so they had to make sure I was in shape enough to be seen. They still gave me shocks, and strange medicines that wracked my stomach. Psychologists went over things point by point with me, picked apart my absurd imaginary friends. I was not abused. Not like the lobotomized or shrieking things in other rooms. Only a witness to abuse.

But my mother believed, absolutely, that I was temporarily ill, even if the illness was of the mind. She was confident that with the right care, good care, I would be well. The avid doctors who were so eager to cut into minds with words and scalpels, so eager to experiment with electricity and human misery, were the ones who thought me incapable of letting go my fancies.

I had to prove the decent, loving human right. I had to take my mother's side, and reject the doctors.

I turned thirteen in the hospital. I turned fourteen back in my mother's home, in the small town. People at first were tentative, but soon enough entrusted their children to me again. It was clear that being around children was something that mattered to me. (I needed healthy, hale children; even the simple girl, even the boy with the bad leg. Healthy and real, compared to the things I'd seen locked in with me.) Children, and real things. Not imaginary friends in imaginary colours.

I went once to look down on the cove. I didn't descend more than halfway down the path. Because I thought I heard a roll of thunder in a clear sky. Because the thunder cried my name, gladness and despair both. I ran.

But I hadn't seen anything, and a dragon would be too big not to see from my viewpoint. So I knew I was well. It made me feel free. 

The simultaneous ache, the hint of tears in my eyes, I dismissed those.

So I told his kin. 

The dragons were kind. I almost wished they weren't. But they understood why I would choose the love of my own mother over all other considerations; even to the point of convincing myself.

"I have to go back," I said. The rumble I heard was not a threat, but a roil of approval. 

"It has been ten years since you saw Pfah Matteh," said one. I was starting to be able to distinguish male from female, though both voices were that thunderous _basso_. The females were more clipped, crisper. This female was Pfah Matteh's sister. "In a dragon's life that is not overly long. While it is likely he has moved on, there is some possibility that he can be found. "

Then his father spoke. "Pfah Matteh was never one to welcome just any child who came along. He was not one to come to the festivals or seek whomever was to be found. Whether this makes any reconciliation easier or harder, I don't know, but keep that thought in you when you meet."

Their most generous gesture was also in many ways the most daunting. 

While we waited for a ship travelling in the right direction, they invited me to come and meet the fostered children, the ones looking for new family. It was not expected, after all, that a first meeting was enough to choose. I went, thinking that it would do no harm at least to see how this country handled its orphans. I was impressed by the plush and comfortable home of the foster parents, a doctor and a professor, I was told. Then we went into the back yard, where the male dragon, Vua Shahu, could join us.

I remember the boy with the deep cleft chin and the inclination to climb everything. I remember a girl whose eyes went so wide when she smiled, and her mouth so big, that she made me laugh just by grinning -- and she liked to make people laugh.

But the moment I met Grace's look, I was sure. She was the girl, two and a half, who'd been cradled to sleep at the festival, in the midst of the tumult. Here, she gave me the same forthright stare that was so common to her age, but when I stepped closer, she tried to shuffle herself behind the dragon's body to peer at me from safety --no doubt secure on the other side of rich red scales from her perspective, but from mine as plain as day. I smiled, and looked away, and sidled and crept until we were all but side by side, just the dragon's long neck between us, a column of bodily warmth and a shimmer like heat haze to me. She was the one to bend her head around the corner to meet my gaze. I offered her my hands. She considered them, then stretched out her fingers and passed me the thing she'd been clutching all the while, a rabbit toy so battered and stitch-broken that it had to be her most precious object. That was it.

I visited often enough it became obvious she was all but adopted - would be, once I had this matter of Pfah Matteh settled. If I found him, if I did my best to find him, if I did whatever could be done to make up for my abandonment. The foster parents were amenable to keeping her with them for as much as another year.

So I was doubly -- triply -- motivated, when I sailed home with Ruthie.

The dragons had also given us a letter that would allow us a private audience with the King. He received us, the same man indeed that I had seen so long ago, with the same affable exterior, accustomed to the scrutiny of thousands of hard-judging eyes. The doctors had convinced me I had invented my meeting with him based on press photographs, but in person, he had the same hint of a stammer, the same habit of ending sentences with an "Ah?", pitched as if a question. In more public audiences, he clearly guarded more closely against these habits. 

He couldn't tell us much. He had only seen Pfah Matteh once since then, and that not even a year after the pirate defeat. He said the dragon had seemed distracted and troubled, but had made light of it. When the King had inquired after me, the dragon had said, "He's busy, no doubt. School grows harder at his age."

His Majesty did say that it was custom for a dragon departing from a country like ours, where they were rare visitors, to make a formal farewell with the King and indicate its destination, and Pfah Matteh hadn't.

I felt some small hope, then, coming home.

I had an unanticipated problem on arrival; my mother's expression on seeing me bringing home a woman so obviously foreign. One of the seven men who had come back from the war at all had come back with a wife from elsewhere. She had been resented at first, considering the number of woman in the town who meant to court our handful of returnees, but the cold shoulders had faded over time in the face of her earnest efforts, and her problems had seemed to me to be irrelevant to my own situation. I had never thought that her black hair or tilted eyes had been a part of the resentment, and so similarly hadn't imagined Ruthie's lustrous skin tone to be an impediment.

It seemed, at least for now, that the momentary expression was the sum total of the reaction. My mother settled back into her hospitable habit, taking Ruthie's hand without any sign of a flinch, and welcoming her as the women of my country tended to -- with ample food and equally ample questions.

Ruthie accepted the food, and fielded the questions pleasantly enough, turning things easily to the discussion of wedding plans and the fact that we'd met an orphan we were considering adopting. But when the meal of greeting was done and a suitable length of time had passed, I told my mother, "I meant to take Ruthie to see the cove while there's still light."

The fear now was harder to mask than her first reaction to my foreign fiancée. I could see echoes of the hospital in the flick of her eyelids, the stark tendons in her neck, and the way her hands cupped. She covered it, with some relief, with another worry. "Oh, that might not be wise. Old Jones went down there and he said there's something strange down there."

"He heard a voice?" I asked, trying hard to hide the hope behind the question.

Her brow creased, now all about polite town news. "No, he said he saw something. A boat, for one, but something moving. Of course he talked about some monster, but surely it had to be smugglers. I know Old Jones doesn't drink, but he does like a bit of a story."

I traded a glance with Ruthie, who was suppressing her hope on my behalf rather worse than I was. It mattered to me to be the dutiful son, the sane son, so I was collected. "We'll be careful," I promised. "The slightest sign of any rough characters - or monsters - I promise you we'll turn back."

"That's my Jacky," my mother said.

But on our way out the door, as my mother wrapped Ruthie in her thickest wool shawl against the sea wind, I couldn't help myself. I said to my mother, "You never did ask where or how I learned to handle a boat."

She waved a hand, meant to be airy and dismissive, but it trembled, as did the new soft skin hanging at her jaw, a sign of aging I hadn't seen until this moment. "Oh, I presumed you were making up a clever story. You so wanted to go to sea, and who was I to give away your game?"

Ruthie pulled my arm, but I stood firm, and said as gently as I could, "If I hadn't really known my work, the Captains would have known. Not only would it have dropped me a pay grade while on the sea, I'd have been thrown off the ship at the next port, with a liar's reputation on my heels."

I turned away, trying to cover that moment with a promise to be careful on our jaunt, but three steps out the door, and rather than close it, my mother caught up with us, and reached out as if to take me in a full embrace there and then, only to have her hands fall to her sides.

"Jacky," she said, and wavered. I closed my hand over the back of hers, her wrist, a reassuring squeeze. I meant it to stop her, but it seemed to give her the courage to go on. "Were we wrong? All along? Is it - real?"

I finally saw what she was facing, what she had been thinking even from Old Jones's story, before even my parting words. A fear that was as consuming, as desperate to be redeemed as my own; the fear that she had put her most beloved son through what she'd believed a necessary torment, and been wrong. 

To that, I had no words, but could only embrace her, hold her close enough that she might believe that I cared more about the love behind the effort, and not its result.

I expected her to crumple again when I let go, to linger in the doorway in a sad shadow until I could come back and assure her. Instead she said, "May I come? May I meet him?"

I could only agree, gather her to my side with Ruthie. On the walk, Ruthie told my mother about her own country. I wondered at the troubling gleam in my mother's eye on the first utterance of the word dragon, until it slipped free and rolled down her cheek.

I had not thought through how overgrown the path would be. The going was hard and brambly. I had to break a route, and Ruthie had to steady mother's arm.

The cove seemed its same self; a sudden bright beauty. The cliff, a breath darker than the beach sand, slanted down rather than dropping sheer, still steep for walkers, but the path zig-zagged, its curves marked by slender trees and bushes growing heavy with berries. I put my hand to the smooth bole of an aged tree that had survived on this precarious slope, noting that the ones I had known as saplings were starting to bear it more resemblance, maturing. Rocks jutted from the water where the cliff met the shore, curving into a long breakwater. The wind was strong enough for waves to froth into the shore, and fill the air with the twin rushing of the water and the grass, but I had frolicked in those waves without fear the sea would turn ugly.

I took a breath of relief when I saw, distinct on the beach, tracks. Not many claws; mostly the long sweeps of a tail. More, I could smell lilac, not fresh, but present even amid sea-smells.

Ruthie pointed. "There?"

It was the deep triangle of a cave, entrance half in the water. "That's where he slept," I murmured. "He might be there; he liked to watch the sunset from the entry." I would have headed that way, but that my mother made a low gasp behind us. 

It stumbled me a little to see, along the other point of the cove, the bleached shape of Pfah Matteh's beloved boat, the _Autumn Mist_ \-- too long out of water, great gaps between the boards and the flapping rag of one sail left. The deck was still half intact, built low enough into the body of the boat to accommodate the size of the dragon without impeding the sails. 

At first I thought that was all she saw. But beyond the hull, emerging from the sea, was another hulking shape.

He had a great Bluefin in his mouth, which he dropped just past the tideline. Like the dragging tail tracks, he was smaller than my memory, but in every other wise, unmistakeable. There was the soft balloon belly, the lilac-leaf crests down his back, the strong pointing tail, sweeping deliberately behind him , humping up the wet sand to hide the more incriminating prints of his feet. There the small wings, which guided him in the air as fish fins did in water. And the great clear eyes, slit-pupilled like a cat's, iris like a knot in deep-varnished acacia.

I clutched Ruthie tight, not ready to trust this echo of my memory. I had not seen dragons in Ruthie's country. I had not imagined seeing one here and now.

Ruthie said, her voice hardly more than a tremor on the air. "Green. Green as Spring."

It stopped my own words in my throat, as the dragon lifted its head from its dinner to be, giving us a forthright examination that reminded me of Grace, back in her dragon country. "Who are you?" he said.

"Pfah Matteh?" I said, but more tentatively now. "It's Jack Paper. Jacky."

"Jacky," it said, slowly -- not the _basso profundo_ of the other dragons, but a baritone, a voice that had no feeling of having weathered. It stepped over its prey, approaching us on tentative legs. As fearless in looking at us as I had been, as any human child was, approaching a dragon.

"Jacky. I remember that name," it said. "My forebear left me a message. It talked of you. It wanted me to pass words on to you."

My mother had pressed her forearms to her chest, fingers up as if in prayer, but pressed hard to her lip. Now she sobbed, once, and took a step forward I wasn't brave enough to follow.

"A reborn, here," Ruthie said, and while her voice was as thick with sorrow, it wasn't for me. "You must be so alone."

"I was told to wait, to count twenty-two years before I left. In case Jacky came," the dragon replied to her, as my mother tottered across the sand, tentative and brave in her own turn, closing on that scaly body, showing me how much smaller he was than memory. Too small to fill the boat. A visible dragon, a dragon all eyes could see, in a colour no longer imaginary.

It spoke more to Ruthie, but I heard not a word. I watched it turn its muzzle towards my mother, dipped downward and slightly aside in an automatic polite gesture - 'I am not going to breathe fire at you', Pfah had described it, but just as effective in promising not to bite - as she stretched out a hand, not touching but asking to touch. It closed the distance.

"I went looking," she said, tears free down her face, but something more likely joy lighting her. "When my son told me his m-mad stories. I didn't see you. I didn't see anything --"

I spun on my heel, and ran for Pfah Matteh's cave. It was large, but a single chamber, a hollow made by water, little more than a sandy floor and stone curving up like a cathedral ceiling.

The sunset light dazzled off the slender spires that now filled it, and shook me to my knees. The jewel-gleam of ribs and tail and spine.

I don't remember seeing any skulls on Reborn Point. But here, it faced me at the end of a neck that seemed bent, even now, more in sorrow than accusation.

I'd abandoned him, dismissed him because I couldn't see him. He'd mourned - mourned so hard he'd wanted to die. But he'd chosen a death that would give the world something new. A dragon green as spring, a dragon that matched my imagination. 

"Pfah," I said. I was a boy again, who gave his heart wholly to a dragon, the most magical of friends. A dragon who'd cared for me as thoroughly, even for a species who spent so much of their interest on children. It was that boy who spoke now, through my voice. "Oh, _Puff_ , I'm sorry."

#

**Author's Note:**

> Random commentary:
> 
> I blame having a toddler for why this story exists.
> 
> This started, believe it or not, as a mock-article explaining *how* the dragons' invisibility and children's ability to see worked in pseudo-science, using the tragedy of Pfah Matteh as an example. I gave that up quickly. 
> 
> I really wanted to use a less abused era rather than an easy mock-medieval default. I chose a post-Great-War variation instead partly because it helped to explain why Jack was alone, and partly because it's such a tragic time and such a hopeful one both; the population of the countries involved was utterly devastated, but life turned positively celebratory. 
> 
> I absolutely refused to make Ruth's country in any way more "primitive" than Honalee.
> 
> 22 as a lucky/magical number crops up in other works, though not in all of them; it started in my teens. 887 years and 4 months is 10648 months, or 22 months cubed.
> 
> Associating the scent of lilac with dragons started in an original work with a very different take on dragons. It may persist over time as well.


End file.
